Rover 75: run cables from under bonnet to cockpit

I was laying cables for parking sensors to be used with the Rover 75 ride I got free of charge from my father. Running them from the holes in the bumper to the engine compartment was no big deal, but connecting the main unit under the bonnet to the display in the passenger compartment was a little harder, since I needed to find a way to run it through cleanly enough.

As improvisation goes (and as my father wanted to do himself) you would be tempted to use, somehow, the cable tubes that you see right in the middle of the rear wall of the engine compartment, but that’s gonna be a hard task. On the other side, if you don’t need to run really big cables, you can use a small hole which you can find on the right side (looking toward the engine, and on my car which has the steering wheel on the left of the cockpit) under a plastic grid you have to remove first.

view of the side of the engine compartment where the hole is located

You have to pull out a waterproof rubber neck that’s fitted around another rigid cable passing through there, to free up enough space to actually run your wires through.

Closer view of the hole and the rubber waterproof protection already pulled out

Then you have to access to the cockpit side of the hole.

this is the area where you will be accessing the cable ran through the under the bonnet hole

There is some unscrewing to do here

unscrew both the screw you see in this picture and the one on the opposite side of the panel

Once you remove the screws, you need to pull the panel out, and if you want a more comfortable working environment, also pull out with a discrete force the front panel where the lights switch is located to free up a larger area.

This is the panel pulled out of its place. You can also pull out the beige frontal panel under the steering wheel if you need to.

If you are in a well lit ambient, you should now be able to see the cable probe (or whatever that’s called in english) passing through the hole you just freed

this is how the hole appears from the inside of the cockpit if you look carefully enough

Let the cable(s) pass on the side of the panel you prefer (door side in my case) and then screw the panel back in place, after reinserting the frontal panel under the steering wheel if you pulled it out.